Saturday, January 26, 2013

Library Love

Librarians have been around as long as there have been libraries, but
women entered the workforce en masse in the late 1800’s. Perhaps it was
the much smaller salary we received compared to our male librarian
counterparts (or just some bad fashion sense), but the stereotype of the
middle-aged, frumpy, spinster librarian with her hair in a bun has been
with us ever since. Christine Lutz’s Master's Thesis on librarian stereotypes traces how librarians and their (mostly male)
administrators have dealt with this image problem for the last one
hundred years. The typical “fix” was to hire young, attractive women and
promote them in library literature and marketing.

At this point, I believe, the dichotomy emerges. Let’s consider what
the librarian and library represent. Librarians are role models for
scholarship and behavior. In public libraries, they are stand-ins for
teachers and enforce a certain level of quiet and restraint with young
patrons. In academic libraries, they are sometimes seen as the
embodiment of knowledge. A fascinating article by Gary and Marie Radford equates libraries with prisons and librarians
with guards. They see the library as an environment of fear, in which
surveillance and control are a constant, and the librarian is in a
position to deny and humiliate the patron.

I think the enduring power of the librarian stereotype and her role in
the collective sexual imagination draws from this place in the psyche.
We discard the de-sexualizing elements of the stereotype (frumpiness,
old age) and retain elements of authority (conservative work “uniform”,
glasses). The result is a sexualized power image that clearly appeals to
both men and women.